A high performance network fabric, for example, InfiniBand and Ethernet, can provide high throughput connectivity for multiple datacenter servers. The traffic streams related to various virtual machines (VMs) flowing through the fabric can consists of various classes of traffic per application needs such as low-latency flows and high-throughput bulk transfer flows.
Traffic through a high performance fabric can include virtualized traffic streams to/from various VMs in a datacenter. Overlay networks enables a datacenter to scale above and beyond the limitation of an existing network due to the emergence of newer overlay protocols. The scaling can add additional packet parsing and processing complexity.
For example, in addition to the packet parsing complexity with larger datacenters/networks, the number of L2-L4 packet parsing and enforcement rules tends to be quite large, which adds complexity to packet parsing and packet-parsing hardware to keep up with the performance targets, for example, in terms of throughput, latency, and power.
As overlay network protocols evolve and are deployed in large datacenters, portions of network protocol level offloads are performed at the lowest hardware component level (e.g., at a network interface card or a switch, or a combination thereof) to keep up with higher throughput and low latency requirements. The protocol level offloads require coarse to fine grain flow (for example, L2-L4) identification for network packets. This process typically involves packet parsing for identifying fields out of the packet and matching them against rules/policies programmed in lookup tables, for example, lookup tables in ternary content-addressable memories (TCAMs). With a large number of flows present in traffic streams and with high aggregate throughput, it would be advantageous to have a solution that can both scale and keep up with performance targets.